Coding Strategies for a Class of Decentralized Control Problems With Limited Communication

The authors propose a large class of decentralized control problems with non-classical information structure for which a coding strategy is optimal. This class is a generalized version of the hats problem with statistically dependent hat colors where implicit communication via action is allowed. They propose a sufficient condition on the joint distribution of the hat colors which guarantees the optimality of a binary sum coding strategy. They explore the connection between this version of the hats problem and hypercube graph theory, and use that to show that verifying their proposed sufficient condition is computationally tractable.